Northeastern University's Board of Trustees announced the appointment of Joseph Aoun, Ph.D. as the University's seventh president and successor to Dr. Richard Freeland.

Dr. Aoun is an internationally known scholar in linguistics and brings over twenty years of higher education experience to Northeastern. Raised in Lebanon, Aoun earned degrees at universities in Lebanon and France before coming to the United States to earn a doctorate in linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He went to USC in 1982 as a professor and was elected president of the Academic Senate in 1993. After that, he took on several administrative positions before rising to dean.

As Dean of the University of Southern California's (USC) College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Dr. Aoun is responsible for the management and oversight of the largest of USC's 19 academic schools, with more than 30 academic departments and programs, more than 10,000 undergraduate students and more than 1,000 graduate students enrolled in somne 30 Ph.D. programs. Under his leadership the College redefined its undergraduate education, strengthened graduate programs and launched distinctive partnerships with educational and cultural organizations such as the Getty Research Institute, the Huntington Library, and the Shoah Foundation, which became part of the College in January 2006. Dr. Aoun will begin his tenure at Northeastern on August 15, 2006.

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